Digipak Final Piece

The Digipak is finally complete. The person that worked hardest on this was easily Tom, but he worked with our guidance and feedback. I personally feel that the final product is very strong. Here it is below.

Album Cover:


Album Reverse:


Inside Sleeve:


Inside Sleeve 2:


Unfolded View:


All of the images we used came from pictures taken while we were filming and there are even a couple of shots from the video.

Ancillary Task Development

After looking at the practice piece I had made for the magazine advertisement, the rest of the group commented that it would perhaps be good enough to use as our final piece. Obviously it would need some changes, but otherwise the idea was good. We looked at what we needed to change and chose:

- The main font; it needed to be more in touch with the Foo Fighters brand
- The amount of writing on the page; it looked to cluttered
- The logos at the bottom needed to show where the album could be bought
- The title of the album didn't neccessarily need to be shown on the poster, it was available on the cover of the artwork. This was visible on the advert.

So after some modification from me and Jake, the advert went from this:


To this:



We felt that our modified piece was sufficient quality to be included as our final piece.

The font we used was in fact the same font used by Foo Fighters in some promotional material:

Practice Magazine Advert

In preparation for the final piece of our ancillary task I decided to make a practice magazine advertisement, just so I could get a feel for the way in which we would have to make it. My work is below:

Editing Progress and Ancillary Task

Editing is coming along nicely, and we are all happy with the progress being made. This time we have enough good quality footage to be working with and the video is working well. However, we have all been putting increased effort into making progress on our ancillary tasks. We have made practice pieces and such, all in preparation for the final pieces. Below is the album front cover Tom has been working on.

Ancillary Task - Magazine Ad

I have decided to take a look at the kind of area our magazine advert would be featured, and I thought that the rock magazine "Kerrang!" would be most likely. So it was this magazine I decided to take a closer look at.

The magazine was introduced as a paper supplement in 1981, and it was initially devoted to the "New Wave of British Heavy Metal" (NWOBHM), along with other hard rock acts. On it's first cover was the Australian band AC/DC. The name was derived from the sound when playing a power chord on an electric guitar, and was an onomatopoeic representation of this.

Throughout it's first 20 years the magazine published more glam and heavy rock acts (I.e. Slayer, Bon Jovi, Poison, Venom). However the turn of the millennium bought a new editor and a new era for Kerrang!. It started to feature more mainstream influential bands without straying from it's original purpose. It was around this time that the Foo Fighters were becoming popular and it wasn't long before they were featured on the cover, as can be seen above. In fact, they were featured in a "Legends" Special Edition, emphasising their growing fame.

The magazine is a reliable source of information for the hard rock scene in today's society and this is reflected in its audience figures. The magazine is published by the Bauer Media Group, with regular circulation of 52,272 as of December 2008. Originally the magazine's audience was primarily an age 18-25 category C demographic. However, more recently the primary readership age has dropped to 14-17. Obviously, these wouldn't be the ONLY readers. We will need to keep this in mind when making our advertisement.

Changes to Digipak

After some more discussion about our ideas for the album cover, we decided that the "one way motorway" idea was fairly weak. Not only that, it might be fairly difficult today and would take up a lot of time. We felt that a more artistic approach would be better, and, given my research, I had to agree. We still had to relate the picture to the music, so we ventured onto the idea of instruments. We thought that an artistic photo of the guitar featured in our video, placed on the front cover of the album would be a very good idea. Jacob, showing a good piece of innovation, made a mood board to inspire us.

Ancillary Piece Specifications

Jake found a very good website that showed specific sizes and dimensions that we would need to use while making the Digipak.

Here is the link.

A Closer Look - Viva La Vida

I decided to take a closer look at one album in particular. The one I chose was Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends.

The album is the fourth studio album by English band Coldplay. Translated, the title means "Live the Life" or "Long live life". Whilst it was interesting researching the album, I was more interested in the album artwork. The main element is the 1830 canvas painting by Eugene Delecroix entitled Liberty Leading the People. It was painted as a backdrop to the French Revolution. It depicts a woman, a personification of liberty, leading revolutionists over the bodies of the fallen. In one hand she brandishes the Tricolore Flag of revolutionary France, in the other hand she holds a loaded musket.

The lead singer of the band, Chris Martin, was inspired by the life and works of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and this is where he got the name for the album. Kahlo's painting of the same name inspired him greatly as he was struck by the appeal to life gouged in the watermelon. Kahlo was involved in revolutionary politics in the Americas and it was this theme that inspired the band to grace the cover of this album with Delecroix. However, the fact that the album is called Viva La Vida is an homage to Kahto. Even Delecroix's work on the album cover is splashed with the phrase in white paint. The decision to use the painting on the cover reflects the political message behind the album. A need for change and revolution in the modern day world is suggested throughout the record and this is reflected in the artwork.

Seeing this, it has made me think about our own album artwork. We will need to capture the message of the music in our own piece. It would be good to keep looking at other albums, and the albums of The Foo Fighters themselves to get the right feel of the music.

Album Cover Mood Board

Whilst looking into album covers, I decided to make a mood board of the ones I thought looked best, as I had done with music videos.




Present on the mood board are:

Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends - Coldplay
The E.N.D. - Black Eyed Peas
Demon Days - Gorillaz
All the Lost Souls - James Blunt
Americana - The Offspring
Contra - Vampire Weekend
Love Ire & Song - Frank Turner
Aladdin Sane - David Bowie
Shining Like a National Guitar - Paul Simon
Everything Goes Numb - Streetlight Manifesto
Move Along - The All American Rejects
Scream, Aim, Fire - Bullet For My Valentine
Greatest Hits - The Lighthouse Family
Riot! - Paramore
Only By the Night - Kings of Leon
Waking the Fallen - Avenged Sevenfold
Greatest Hits II - Queen
The Black Parade - My Chemical Romance
Three Little Birds - Bob Marley & The Wailers

Ancillary Task

The other thing we had to start looking at at this point was our ancillary task. We chose to produce a magazine advertisement and a CD Digipak. Of course, this would require more independent research and group planning. We started looking at album covers for research and discussing what would make a good album cover in relation to the song. One particular idea was to play on the lyric "I'm a one way motorway". Jacob's idea was to take a photo of a local motorway at night with an decreased shutter speed. This would create a blurring affect on the lights of the motorway, making them appear as singular straight lines. We could then manipulate the image in Photoshop to make it look like only one side of the motorway was in use, hence "One way motorway". Jake said he would look into the dimensions and requirements of a Digipak, Tom was going to research possible locations to take our photo and me and Jacob looked a bit more into existing album covers.